Supreme Commander

Publisher: THQ

We used the full retail version of Supreme Commander with the version 3223 patch applied. Supreme Commander is developed by Chris Taylor, the creator of the Total Annihilation series, and his development team, Gas Powered Games. Together, Taylor and his team have created what is widely regarded as the spiritual successor to one of the greatest RTS games of all time.

SupCom is a hugely tactical and strategic monster on a massive scale -- hundreds of units can appear on screen at once. It's a massive departure from anything else we've recently seen in the genre. It's one of (if not) the first RTS to allow the player to scroll out to view the scale of battle in its entirety.

We used the game's in-built performance test during our testing, as this provides over seven minutes of variable gameplay -- both zoomed in and out -- that should represent typical scenarios that a user is likely to encounter whilst playing the game. Due to the massive scale of the game, it's incredibly hard to accurately quantify performance in any other way. All in-game settings were set to medium.





XFX's GeForce 8600 GT XXX Edition has an impressive showing in SupCom, as it manages to outperform the Radeon X1950 Pro at 1024x768 with 4xAA 16xAF and manages to match the same card at 1280x1024 4xAA 16xAF. At 1680x1050, the card drops back a little bit but strictly speaking, the resolution this card is most-likely to be used at is 1280x1024.